Julian Barnes and the Subversion of the Sense of an Ending

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Much theoretical attention has been devoted to the surprise ending, but it is still unclear how fully a surprise ending must resolve global instabilities for it to be aesthetically satisfying. To refine James Phelan’s theory, I argue that in character narration with multiple global instabilities the surprise ending must resolve the global instabilities which are most important to the narrator. My example is Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011), which presents a surprise ending that generally fits well with the progression—which focuses on the global instability of Tony’s relationship with his past—even though it fails to account for the global instability of Mrs. Ford’s inheritance, which more explicitly initiates Tony’s reevaluation of his past. I draw on Armine Kotin Mortimer’s concept of the “second story,” which refers to the reader’s reconstruction, based on given cues, of a significant submerged element that constitutes a complete narrative. Mortimer is helpful for my inquiry because, in terms of the completeness of plot, the criterion for the second story is more rigorous than the existing ones for the surprise ending. Even though Barnes’s ending does not meet Mortimer’s criterion, it is successful because it supplies the narrator’s motivations for storytelling and resolves the more important of the two global instabilities, namely the narrator’s relationship with his past. In turn, Barnes’s ending offers us a more or less complete progression concerning the development of the character narrator.